Monthly Archives: January 2010

Welcome to the regular weekly blog post. With all the other highlights during the week, most noticeably the release of qooxdoo 1.0.1, coincidentally at the day of qooxdoo’s 5 year anniversary, we’ll keep it short:

Patch for qooxdoo 0.7.4 in Firefox 3.6

This week we found out that the legacy qooxdoo 0.7.4 version has an inadvertently incomplete bug fix for the deprecated “getBoxObjectFor” method in Firefox 3.6, which was released a few days ago. We now created a patch to allow qooxdoo 0.7.4 to run as intended, i.e. correctly, in Firefox 3.6.

Download the complete ”qx.html.Loaction” class file and replace the local one, or apply the SVN diff to the 0.7.4 version. For more details have a look at the corresponding bug report.

Bugs

For a complete list of bugs fixed during the last working week, use this bugzilla query.

After the successful launch of qooxdoo 1.0 end of last year, here comes a regular update to incorporate the latest bug fixes and also a number of enhancements.

qooxdoo 1.0.1 is a patch release, meant to be backwards compatible to the previous major release qooxdoo 1.0. No migration steps should be necessary to continue to develop and build your existing apps. Please upgrade to take full advantage of this latest stable release.

From the detailed release notes, here are some of the most important fixes:

Fixed an issue in Firefox 3.6, which was released last week (01/21/2010). The native scrollbar widgets did no longer react on clicks on the scrollbar buttons. This is a known regression in Firefox 3.6, but fortunately we could find a workaround for this issue.

Fixed a critical issue that prevented IE to run properly under SSL. See Bug #3305 for details. It is strongly recommended to update to this release, if your application is deployed via https.

Hiding elements, which use the AlphaImageLoader, can occasionally cause IE to completely black out the screen. We now use a technique described here to fix it.

As the latest stable version it is also perfect for new users to easily get started with qooxdoo. Download and enjoy this brand new qooxdoo release.

While it is hard to exactly determine the actual start of a project like qooxdoo, January 27th, 2005 was the day the project was registered at SourceForge, the world’s largest OSS development web site. This first official appearance certainly qualifies as the “birthday” of qooxdoo.

As a true open source project qooxdoo used public code repositories right from the start. Everyone that followed the progress of the framework over time, either in a passive or active role, saw some very remarkable steps: after the first official release in early 2005 there have been a total of 27 stable releases of qooxdoo, including some ground-breaking and really innovative packages.

When talking about 2005, it is interesting to note that qooxdoo started a month before the term “AJAX” was even coined. While nobody could really foresee all the hype about Ajax, there was already a clear understanding of the potential if not power of JavaScript and modern, cross-browser applications. And a need for qooxdoo as an advanced application framework to make that vision a reality.

It is our pleasure to thank all the people that kept believing in this vision and made it such a fascinating reality! The support by 1&1 as the initiator and maintainer of the framework is indispensable, employing us as a team of full-time core developers. Working with fellow committers and a large number of contributors is a great every-day experience and always a source of inspiration. You really help making this an outstanding JavaScript framework. Last but not least many thanks to all of you who create impressive applications with it, but don’t forget to let us know about weak points to address, and also to tell others about the strong points and the fun in working with qooxdoo.

Lets make it another 5 years of innovation, success and fun of developing and using qooxdoo!

Here comes another weekly status report. This time it is a rather short one, since we were quite busy with bugfixing, roadmap planning and various other stuff.

Native JSON support

Last week we have landed a commit, which adds native JSON support to qooxdoo. There is a new class qx.lang.Json, which has exactly the same interface as the JSON object defined in the EcmaScript 5 specification. All new browsers like Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 8, Opera 10.5 or Safari 4 support it natively. In browsers without native JSON support a modified version of Douglas Crockford’s json2 is used. This is great news because parsing and serializing JSON is a lot faster in those browsers.